


Playing with fire

by Aza (sazandorable)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Bisexual Agnes Montague (is what I had in mind but you can interpret as you like), Canonical age differences fuckery, Canonical minor character deaths/murder/disfiguration/etc, F/F, F/M, Mspec female character (unspecified), Season 5 Spoilers, Touching, there is also a little Agnes/Jude but not fun as an actual ship so not maintagging it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-18 08:47:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29115489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sazandorable/pseuds/Aza
Summary: Agnes does not know how to touch something without destroying it. She does not know how else to want it.Written forTMA Bi/Pan/Mspec Week 2021, day 5:Touch| Intersectionality || Gerry |Agnes| Annabelle
Relationships: Agnes Montague & Raymond Fielding, Agnes Montague/Gertrude Robinson, Agnes Montague/Jack Barnabas, Agnes Montague/Ronald Sinclair
Comments: 4
Kudos: 22
Collections: TMA Mspec Week 2021





	Playing with fire

**Author's Note:**

> Yes this definitely contradicts at least 1 or 2 details stated in canon about the Agnes / Gertrude / HTR timeline, I know, that's because it's impossible to make all the details of canon match, I spent all day combing through the episodes and crying over dates, Jonny definitely did fuck up/retcon at least a couple things, at one point you just have to pick and choose which to go with, please don't @ me *crying*
> 
> I _don't_ K-pop but title from [this video because it really does have big Agnes vibes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pdj4iJD08s)

At eleven years old, Agnes wants to touch Ronald Sinclair like she wants to touch someone else’s stuff.

She does like Ronald. He is tall and nice, although everyone in the house is the same sort of dull ‘nice’. She spots him smoking in front of the house and that feels like kinship, although it is a very diluted analogue of the burning and smoking of her own insides. Still, the recognition is enough to spark genuine affection, and there is a reason why she leaves him alive, why she frees him instead of just destroying him, why the way she decides to give him her blessing is with a peck on his cheek. A mark, literally, of her affection.

But mostly, it’s about Ray.

The candy bar is tasty, but it’s not really about wanting the candy bar; it’s about wanting to make the other kid cry from losing his candy bar.

Ray doesn’t cry, not literally.

Not this time, anyway.

It’s okay. There are more kids to go. Plenty of things to take from him; the kids, the house. She is here for a long time, and she wants to touch everything.

At twenty-five years old, Agnes wants to touch Jude like she wants to poke an open wound, or a kitten. Just to see what happens, just to see her twitch and twist in pain. Jude wants her, wants Agnes to touch her, so it’s not really a challenge or exciting, but it is morbidly fascinating to watch Jude’s skin melt and reform under Agnes’s fingers, listen to her screams of mixed agony and ecstasy.

It’s not as satisfying as true destruction and loss, however, and Agnes is used to being worshipped; Jude is only as interesting as a new toy, for a while.

At twenty-six years old, Agnes wants to touch Gertrude Robinson like she wants to touch a kitchen stovetop. It would hurt, and that is part of the appeal. She has never had anything forbidden from her in her entire life — partly from being a worshipped messiah, partly from her childhood tantrums having a tendency to lead to her literally blowing up — and it is tantalising, maddening, excruciating. It is not the pain of loss, but it is close enough to be delectable to her too. Craving, longing, without satisfaction.

Touching Gertrude Robinson would destroy her which would destroy Agnes herself, and Agnes cannot stop thinking about it. She can feel her, all day, every day, all the time, the woman tied to her, pulling her, and she cannot touch her.

Agnes has been burning her entire life, but now she is learning about smouldering with nothing for the flame to eat, about being slowly consumed from the inside.

They do meet, eventually, though it is decades later. Agnes is still twenty-six. The woman before her is old, frail, tired. Burning, too; with anger, with strength, with destruction. Her flame has light; it would be blinding, Agnes thinks, for a normal person. Agnes stares into it unblinking, and yearns to reach out, to take the gnarled old hand on the café table across from her in hers, make her own impact on Gertrude, pull her along into divine death and free her like Gertrude pulled her down to mundane earthly life and anchored her. Claim Gertrude’s life, like Gertrude claimed Agnes’s.

She doesn’t, in the end; she reins in the flames, smothers the fire, keeps it down to just that slowly smouldering ember.

Instead, Gertrude asks her to touch something else, to burn someone else, another little spider who is powerless against Agnes. There is something intimate about it; destroying someone who hurt Gertrude, destroying someone Gertrude cared about. Like embracing Gertrude and hurting her at the same time, from a safe distance, still without ever physically laying a finger on her.

At fifty and a few years old (unsure; she has long stopped paying attention), Agnes wants to touch Jack Barnabas like she wants to touch fresh untrodden snow and ruin it.

He is wide-eyed and flushed and cute and when he asks her on a date she says yes because she wants to ruin him, like all the other people she has hurt and destroyed before.

And she doesn’t.

Agnes still doesn’t really know a lot about normal people, but she knows enough to tell that Jack lives a dismal life in a dismal flat, works a dismal job, at a dismal cafe. He doesn’t have a lot to take from him. He doesn’t have a lot to give Agnes.

He doesn’t want anything from her, either, she realises on their third date. They are walking back from the cinema to his place and he is walking beside her and talking about his dismal weekend, and he looks happy. Just to be with her. He doesn’t ask for details of her life, doesn’t force her to talk or to eat or to find interest in the movie or to behave like a normal person. He hasn’t made a single move to try to take her hand, to embrace her, to kiss her.

She wants to touch him.

It wouldn’t hurt her, not like touching Gertrude would. She has hurt and destroyed so many humans; it doesn’t hurt her.

So why isn’t she doing it?

That’s the question, isn’t it. Jude asks, and Arthur asks, and Agnes doesn’t have anything to answer.

She goes to Jack’s flat again, and again, picks him up for another date, and another, and continues to want to touch him, and continues not to do it.

The thing is, Agnes has been burning for her entire life. She does not know how to touch something without destroying it. She does not know how else to want it.

In the end, when she is going to die, Jack looks at her with his big doe eyes and asks, in his low nervous voice, if he can kiss her, and she wants to, she wants to, she wants to, and she is going to die.

She does it for herself, not for him. She still does not know how to touch without destroying, so she ruins him, because she is an incarnation of destruction and loss and there is no way in the universe she could have him and keep him.

She is crying, she realises afterwards, after he has gone silent and dropped unconscious, melted and charred and smoking; she is crying because it hurts, because loss hurts. And yet, not one part of her regrets it.


End file.
